August 26

Carl Robert Keyes Uncategorized , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Norwich Packet (August 26, 1776).

“Those who live off the Road are desired to leave the Money where they receive their Papers.”

During the era of the American Revolution, newspapers often featured advertisements from the post riders who delivered them to readers beyond the cities and towns where they were printed.  Sometimes the post riders promoted their services, seeking new customers, but other times they called on current customers to pay for their services.  Like newspaper printers, post riders extended credit to their patrons and, in turn, experienced similar difficulties in collecting from them.

Such was the case for Leonard Hills, a post rider who carried the Norwich Packet; and the Connecticut, Massachusetts, New-Hampshire & Rhode-Island Weekly Advertiser to subscribers in New England.  With a hint of exasperation, he declared that he “ONCE more earnestly requests his Customers who are indebted to him … to make immediate payment” in an advertisement in the August 26, 1776, edition.  Hills warned of the consequences, drawing attention with both a manicule and italics: “Those that do not speedily comply with the above reasonable Demand, may expect to have their Papers discontinued.”

Who would make that decision?  The advertisement suggested that Hills made it rather than the printer, John Trumbull. The advertisement also revealed other aspects of how the service worked.  “Those who live off the Road,” Hills instructed, “are desired to leave the Money where they receive their Papers.”  The post rider did not deliver the Norwich Packet to every subscriber along his route.  Instead, he left the right number of copies at a central location, such as a tavern, for subscribers to retrieve when they had a chance.  Local agents thus assisted in distributing the newspapers once Hills dropped them off.  Hills also stated that he was “obliged to settle with the PRINTER,” indicating that Trumbull did not directly handle subscriptions along Hills’s route.  Instead, the post rider sold and managed those subscriptions.  He also called on his customers to pay for “this Paper, Advertisements, &c.”  That suggested that Hills served as an intermediary who handled advertisements that his customers placed in the Norwich Packet (and did so on credit rather than being required to pay for advertisements in advance) and that the post rider sold other items, perhaps almanacs or books.  Hills’s notice revealed all sort of details about the services he provided.  As a post rider, he assumed many responsibilities beyond merely deliver newspapers.

Slavery Advertisements Published August 26, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Boston-Gazette (August 26, 1776).

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Boston-Gazette (August 26, 1776).

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Boston-Gazette (August 26, 1776).

August 25

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago this week?

Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (August 24, 1776).

“DIXON and HUNTER have on Hand the following BOOKS, which they will sell cheap, for Cash.”

John Dixon and William Hunter doubled the size of the Virginia Gazette that they published on August 24, 1776.  Like other newspapers, it usually consisted of four pages created by printing two pages on each side of a broadsheet and then folding it in half.  This time, however, they used two broadsheets, bringing the total number of pages to eight.  That meant printing the first, second, seventh, and eighth pages on one broadsheet and the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth pages on another, tucking the second folded broadsheet inside the first one.

The printers devoted the entire fifth page and half of the sixth page to a book catalog, something they did occasionally in other issues as well.  A brief introduction informed readers that “DIXON and HUNTER have on Hand the followingBOOKS, which they will sell cheap, for Cash.”  A lengthy list of books followed.  The printers arranged them in order of size – folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos – from largest to smallest.  The catalog included only four folios and nine quartos but dozens of octavos and duodecimos, some of them in multiple volumes.  Within each category, Dixon and Hunter arranged the titles in rough alphabetical order by author, such as “Burn’s Justice of the Peace” or “Pope’s Works,” but sometimes by title, such as “An Account of the Spanish Settlements in America.”  That made the list easier for readers to navigate, especially if they were looking for a particular volume.

The format of the catalog distinguished it from news, editorials, and other advertisements in that issue of the Virginia Gazette.  Most content appeared in two wide columns, but the catalog had three columns.  If an entry was too long or just one line in the narrower columns, the printers indented the second and subsequent lines, differentiating each entry from the ones above and below it.  On the sixth page of the newspaper, the second page of the catalog, that meant that three columns appeared on the top half of the page but only two columns on the bottom half.  Once again, the format distinguished Dixon and Hunter’s advertisement from other content.  The catalog concluded with a list of “SCHOOL BOOKS” and “STATIONARY” in dense paragraphs of text.  Readers had to invest more effort in finding “Ruddiman’s Grammatical Exercises” and “Entick’s Latin and English Dictionary” or “Pewter Ink Chests of various Kinds” and “Magazine Paper for Ladies to work upon.”

Dixon and Hunter printed twice as much content for subscribers and other readers of the August 24, 1776, edition of the Virginia Gazette, yet their own advertisement, their book catalog, accounted for a significant portion of the additional content.  They exercised their privilege as printers of the newspaper to promote another endeavor that generated revenue in their printing office.

August 24

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Providence Gazette (August 24, 1776).

“A male CHILD, about 5 Months old, was taken from the House of Susannah Reiley.”

Early American newspapers did not usually carry a lot of local news.  Printers devoted much more space to news received from distant places, whether elsewhere along the Atlantic coast or across the ocean.  After all, most newspapers came out just once a week.  Some local news was old news before it could appear in print because it already spread via word of mouth.  Consider the August 24, 1776, edition of the Providence Gazette.  News from London filled the first page, followed by news from Williamsburg, Philadelphia, and New York on the second page.  News from Providence ran on the third page, alongside advertisements.  Paid notices filled most of the final page.

Yet those advertisements delivered all sorts of local news that readers wished to disseminate to the public.  For a fee, they purchased space and served as editor when it came to determining what would appear in that space.  Two advertisements described soldiers that deserted from their regiments.  That had become a common enough occurrence that John Carter, the printer, did not necessarily consider it news that he would select to publish, especially not when he could generate revenue by printing it as an advertisement, but the advertisers and readers considered the information newsworthy.

Another advertisement delivered news of a crime that recently occurred in Johnston, a town just west of Providence.  On July 18, “a male CHILD, about 5 Months old, was taken from the House of Susannah Reiley, while she was gone to bring a Pail of Water from a Spring.”  Reiley had not been negligent.  The spring was only fifteen rods (about 250 feet) from her house, but she was away and out of sight long enough that someone kidnapped the baby.  The advertisement did not describe the search undertaken nor other subsequent events.  Instead, it provided what amounted to a headline summary.  With the fate of the child unknown, residents of Johnston issued a plea for “any Intelligence of said Child,” including “if living or dead.”  The advertisement delivered local news and likely spurred conversations and speculation about what had happened.

Slavery Advertisements Published August 24, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Constitutional Gazette (August 24, 1776).

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Freeman’s Journal (August 24, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Evening Post (August 24, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Ledger (August 24, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Ledger (August 24, 1776).

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Providence Gazette (August 24, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (August 24, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (August 24, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (August 24, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (August 24, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Dixon and Hunter] (August 24, 1776).

August 23

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Connecticut Gazette (August 23, 1776).

“The Advertisement … against Elenor Fairfield … is Unjust and Cruel.”

It was a rare instance of a wife accused of abandoning her husband in a newspaper advertisement publishing a response.  In the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century, American newspapers carried notices now known as “runaway wife” advertisements.  Using standardized language and a familiar format, husbands alleged that their wives misbehaved and left them without cause.  In turn, the husbands warned merchants, shopkeepers, and others not to extend credit to the women who fled from their households and from the authority they were supposed to exercise there.  In most instances, the wives did not have the resources to publish their own version of events, but occasionally advertisements contradicting the stories told by husbands did appear.

Connecticut Gazette (July 26, 1776).

The July 26, 1776, edition of the Connecticut Gazette carried William Fairfield’s advertisement for the first time.  In it, he proclaimed that his wife, Elenor, “has without Just cause Denied my bead and bord” in Woodstock.  In turn, he ran the notice “to forbid all persons Harbouring or trusting or concealing of her things which she hath unjustly carry of or traiding with hir on my account for I will not [pay] one farthing of hir Debt She may cantract.”  Like most other advertisements, Fairfield’s notice ran multiple times, giving readers in New London, Woodstock, and other towns several opportunities to see it.

Fairfield likely expected to have the last and only word in the public prints, but eighteen of his neighbors decided that would not be the case.  They published their own notice in response to “the Advertisement in the Connecticut Gazette, Number 663, against Elenor Fairfield the Wife of William Fairfield, of Woodstock.”  The considered his advertisement “Unjust and Cruel,” explaining that “her leaving of him, was from his Cruelty.”  Then they went into even more detail, revealing much more than William included in his advertisement.  Elenor resorted to “swearing the Peace against him … for her own Safety.”  According to her friends and neighbors, “18 credible Persons in the Neighbourhood where she has long lived,” the fault belonged entirely to William because Elenor was “a dutiful Wife when used with Humanity, a kind and tender Mother, [and] a good Neighbour [who] sustains a good Character.”  Unfortunately, she had become “abject and miserable by her Husband’s misconduct.”  It was out of “Justice to her injured Character” that her friends and neighbors ran their own advertisement about what had occurred in Woodstock.

Seven men and eleven women signed that advertisement.  The men’s names appeared first in one paragraph, followed by the women’s names in a separate paragraph.  That testified to the men’s authority, especially in interacting with other men, but readers could not ignore the women who also affixed their names.  Some readers, especially women, may have had greater trust in the women who defended Elenor.  After all, circles of female friends and acquaintances in Woodstock likely interacted with Elenor more often than most men in the community and had greater awareness of how her husband treated her and the discord in the Fairfield household.  That did not mean that men did not witness mistreatment, but rather that women often had greater access to the everyday experiences of other women.

Slavery Advertisements Published August 23, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (August 23, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (August 23, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (August 23, 1776).

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Virginia Gazette [Purdie] (August 23, 1776).

August 22

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

New-England Chronicle (August 22, 1776).

“Colonel Greaton and his Regiment had a great Desire that he would return back with Letters.”

One officer and the soldiers in his regiment devised a clever way of receiving mail from home while they served in the army during the American Revolution.  On August 22, 1776, Elijah French of Braintree, Massachusetts, ran an advertisement in the New-England Chronicle that announced that he “just returned from Ticonderoga.”  He brought news that “Colonel Greaton and his Regiment had a great Desire that he would return back with Letters.”  French did not mention why he had been to Ticonderoga or whether he had business there that made it necessary to return, but he did accept the charge to solicit and deliver letters.  He advised readers of the New-England Chronicle that “whosever has Friends in that Regiment or any other, and would choose to write, may depend upon their Letters being safely conveyed to their Friends.”  In addition, they could expect “an Answer back as soon as possible with the greatest Care and Speed.”

French provided an invaluable service for soldiers far from home and their friends and family in Boston and nearby towns.  He did not mention any sort of fee for carrying the letters, suggesting that he acted as an informal messenger rather a post rider.  He did, however, devise an extensive network of local agents who collected letters, making it more convenient for friends and family to send them.  That may have prompted more friends to write to the soldiers who longed for word from home.  French instructed “Those Persons who would choose to send … to leave their Letters at the Widow Cowing’s or Bracket’s, in Braintree, Vose or Davis’s, in Milton, Partridge, the Barber’s in Roxbury, or the Sign of the Lamb in Boston” before the second Monday in September.  After that, he would make his rounds to each of those places to collect the letters before departing for Ticonderoga.  The assistance of a widow in Braintree, a barber in Roxbury, a tavernkeeper in Boston, and the other local agents (along with an advertisement in the public prints) made delivering mail to soldiers a community effort, an eighteenth-century version of supporting the troops.

Slavery Advertisements Published August 22, 1776

Carl Robert Keyes Slavery Adverts 250 Project

The Slavery Adverts 250 Project chronicles the role of newspaper advertising in perpetuating slavery in the era of the American Revolution. The project seeks to reveal the ubiquity of slavery in eighteenth-century life from New England to Georgia by republishing advertisements about enslaved people – for sale as individuals or in groups, wanted to purchase or for hire for short periods, runaways who liberated themselves, and those who were subsequently captured and confined in jails and workhouses – in daily digests on this site as well as in real time via the @SlaveAdverts250 Twitter feed, utilizing twenty-first-century media to stand in for the print media of the eighteenth century.

The project aims to provide modern audiences with a sense of just how often colonizers encountered these advertisements in their daily lives. Enslaved men, women, and children appeared in print somewhere in the colonies almost every single day. Those advertisements served as a constant backdrop for social, cultural, economic, and political life in colonial and revolutionary America. Colonizers who did not purport to own enslaved people were still confronted with slavery as well as invited to maintain the system by purchasing enslaved men, women, and children or assisting in the capture of so-called “runaways” who sought to free themselves from bondage. The frequency of these newspaper advertisements suggests just how embedded slavery was in colonial and revolutionary American culture in everyday interactions beyond the printed page.

These advertisements also testify to the experiences of enslaved men, women, and children, though readers must consider that those experiences have been remediated through descriptions offered by enslavers rather than enslaved people themselves. Often unnamed in the advertisements, enslaved men, women, and children were not invisible or unimportant in early America.

These advertisements appeared in revolutionary American newspapers 250 years ago today.

Continental Journal (August 22, 1776).

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Continental Journal (August 22, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (August 22, 1776).

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Maryland Gazette (August 22, 1776).

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Pennsylvania Evening Post (August 22, 1776).

August 21

Carl Robert Keyes Daily Advert Update , , , ,

What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?

Massachusetts Spy (August 21, 1776).

“Stoughtons grand Stomachic Elixir, proper for all Soldiers to carry with them in the camp.”

During the Revolutionary War, Shephard and Hunt adapted their newspaper advertisements to the times.  The partners operated a store that sold medicines and a “variety of other articles in the Apothecary way” at a store in Worcester in the summer of 1776.  In a notice in the August 21 edition of the Massachusetts Spy, they listed an assortment of patent medicines and medical supplies that commonly appeared in similar advertisements, including “Anderson’s Pills, Hunters Catheters, neat Lancet Cases, Smelling Bottles with Cases, Vials and half pint Bottles by the Crate, or single dozen, [and] Batemans Drops.”

Under other circumstances, apothecaries and other retailers usually listed patent medicines without commentary or explanation.  Those remedies were so familiar to consumers that advertisers did not consider it necessary to elaborate on them.  In this instance, however, Shephard and Hunt did not merely list Stoughton’s Elixir as one among several patent medicines.  Instead, they named it “Stoughtons grand Stomachic Elixir” and stated that the potion was “proper for all Soldiers to carry with them in the camp.”  The apothecaries identified an ailment that commonly afflicted soldiers and made a pitch to them to purchase a medicine that would provide relief.  They provided a small comfort “at a very moderate advance for Cash” to soldiers fighting a war for independence.

That was not the only service that Shephard and Hunt undertook for the war effort.  They informed all customers that they “may depend upon being well used, and with dispatch,” while extending a special invitation to “Gentlemen who supply the Army of the United States.”  In addition to quick and efficient customer service, those “Gentlemen … may be furnished with a number of articles suitable for the camp.”  Apothecaries sometimes prepared boxes of medicines and supplies for ships or homes.  Shephard and Hunt may have done the same for doctors and others in military camps.  Even if they did not, they stocked medical supplies “suitable for the camp” and sought to attract customers affiliated with the American army who would purchase in volume.  As they continued to serve civilian customers, Shephard and Hunt also marketed their wares to soldiers and the army.